Pictures, Pictures, Pictures

I wouldn't say that I know Flickr inside and out but, we have been spending a serious amount of time together.  I uploaded some family pictures, edited them using Picnik and created a slideshow (with a link on my blog).  Creating the account and uploading the images was simple.  I would not use Piknik again (which is good since it is closing next month), but instead, as recommended by Richardson (Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, p. 103) would do my editing prior to uploading my images.

The slideshow was user friendly.  I was able to add images and arrange them in the order I wanted, I had a few glitches along the way but nothing serious.  I love how easy it is to share using Flickr. I emailed the slideshow to my family and explored connecting it to my blog. 

Originally, I shared the images using blogger, from the Flickr website; this created a new post with thumbnails which seemed a bit more intrusive than I wanted for my family photos so I decided to add the slideshow as a link in my design instead.

This created a check on my inquiry to do list but, I was interested to see what I could do with Flickr on a professional level.  My plan is to take pictures of my students working on a Language Arts assignment which I will upload to Flickr and then post on our class website.  Then, using the annotation tool, I will have them comment on their contribution to a group display for the same unit.  As Richardson promised, the annotation tool is really great for highlighting parts of an image.  When you scroll over the image, boxes appear, scrolling over the boxes reveals the text.

In our class we do a lot of work on inferring and it hadn't occurred to me until reading Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (Richardson, 2010, p. 105) that Flickr is the ideal tool for this.  Last year, to teach this skill I looked through old National Geographic Magazines and photocopied (in black and white) sets of images...how archaic of me! Needless to say the quality was terrible and the lesson, mediocre.  This year we will be in the computer lab.